other people have touched upon this in Vaidhyanathan's work, but one of the things he talks about that i find really interesting is how people are taking films and creating their own edits and interpretations, like the Phantom Edit, or Puchkov's goblin dubs. What I liked about this was the idea that usually when people think about art, but particularly with film since production is such a process, what people view is often seen as a finished product. With what these folks are doing, they're asserting that art is never finished, and can always be reinterpreted, retinkered with, etc.

One theme we've talked about in class while discussing authorship, is one does the role of intention play. Does it matter what the author intends at all? As Vaidhyanathan writes, "an author cannot control how a character, idea or plot will be read, refasioned, or criticized".

An interesting article about the Chinese bans on Wikipedia:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/17/china.internet.ap/index.html

It seems so weird to me, since in the US you can basically find anything on the internet, despite some censorship. Freedom of speech is a huge debate in China, for fear of discussion of politically banned issues. There is apparently a lot of censorship of the internet access in China and I just found it interesting how much the Chinese government decides whose opinions can be expressed and what is inappropriate to put on the internet. Anyway, the topic is interesting, but if you don't want to read the whole thing (a whole 3 minutes of reading); here is the part I found most interesting:

Living in Westwood this summer, I had the chance to go to a few of the films screened during the LA film festival. One of them was, “This Film is Not Yet Rated”, a film about the movie rating system. (The film is in theaters now, go check it out if you’re interested). The intention of the director, Kirby Dick, is to expose the giant grasp the MPAA has on the film industry and the gross biases with which the MPAA operates. Relating to authorship, however, I think the film implicitly brings up some good issues – primarily, what is the interplay between censorship and authorship? If an author is not given total creative license to produce whatever he or she wants, does this affect his or her authorship?